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Indignez-vous!

Indignez-vous!

In the first English translation of a cri de coeur that has topped bestseller lists for months in France, the 93-year-old hero of the French Resistance urges a new generation to renew the struggle for social justice.

February 16, 2011

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Editor’s Note: Below you will find an excerpt taken from the first English translation of Stéphane Hessel’s "Indignez-vous!," published this week by The Nation. The essay is available in full text only to our subscribers in the print magazine and in the PDF version of the March 7/14 issue. Subscribers, please click here to access the full text PDF. Non-subscribers can subscribe to The Nation and gain access to the full text of “Indignez-vous!” by clicking here.

Ninety-three years. I’m nearing the last stage. The end cannot be far off. How lucky I am to be able to draw on the foundation of my political life: the Resistance and the National Council of the Resistance’s program from sixty-six years ago….

The motivation that underlay the Resistance was outrage. We, the veterans of the Resistance movements and fighting forces of Free France, call on the younger generations to revive and carry forward the tradition of the Resistance and its ideas. We say to you: take over, keep going, get angry! Those in positions of political responsibility, economic power and intellectual authority, in fact our whole society, must not give up or let ourselves be overwhelmed by the current international dictatorship of the financial markets, which is such a threat to peace and democracy….

We must realize that violence turns its back on hope. We have to choose hope over violence—choose the hope of nonviolence. That is the path we must learn to follow. The oppressors no less than the oppressed have to negotiate to remove the oppression: that is what will eliminate terrorist violence. That is why we cannot let too much hate accumulate….

To you who will create the twenty-first century, we say, from the bottom of our hearts,
TO CREATE IS TO RESIST.
TO RESIST IS TO CREATE.

Subscribers, please click here to access the full text PDF. Non-subscribers can subscribe to The Nation and gain access to the full text of "Indignez-vous!" by clicking here.

Stephane HesselStephane Hessel, who fought with the French Army and the Resistance in World War II, was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. After the war he served as a French and UN diplomat and was named a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor in 2006.